Rick Holmes: Fuzzy reception with TV switchover

Your television is about to change on you, in ways few people understand. The only question is when.

Rick Holmes

Your television is about to change on you, in ways few people understand. The only question is when.

The conversion from analog to digital TV has been in the works for years. For at least a year, broadcasters and electronics stores have been trumpeting Feb. 17, 2009 as doomsday for old-fashioned TVs.

The message has been simplified for public service spots and short attention spans - probably too simplified. If you have a TV no more than two years old, or if you get your signal through a cable or a satellite dish, they say, don't worry. Nothing will change. If you have an older TV, connected to rabbit ears or an antenna on your roof, all you need to do is buy a digital TV converter box for about $60 - and Uncle Sam will help out with a $40 coupon.

Well, there's more to it than that. Much more.

For starters, the feds ran out of money for the coupons, so the best you can do now is get on a waiting list for future reimbursement. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who at the time was chairman of the House committee overseeing the digital conversion program, was told by the Bush administration last November that everything was going swimmingly. On Dec. 24, he was told the money was gone.

But you can still get a digital converter box, plug it in and be all set on Feb. 17, when broadcasters stop sending out analog signals, right? Not exactly.

Digital broadcasting sends a clearer signal using less bandwidth, enabling TV stations to send out high-definition signals, and broadcast up to six channels of programming on the same spectrum width they now use to send one. But analog signals bounce off buildings, trees and hills, which means TVs can often receive a fuzzy signal far from the transmitter. Digital signals travel in a straight line.

DTV converter boxes will catch most channels and clean them up. After the conversion, most people will get a much sharper picture than they've gotten through their old antennas. But they won't pick up a weak signal - and channels you may have barely received if you turned the rabbit ears just right may disappear entirely.

Of course, it all depends on where you live. Markey doesn't expect people in greater Boston will have problems. He has met with station operators who say they don't expect to lose any viewers. But if you live - or vacation - on the coast of Maine or the mountains of Vermont, you may wake up Feb. 17 and find your viewing choices have shrunk from five to three.

A source inside the DTV conversion program told me about an elderly woman he heard from in the mountains of Tennessee. Cable doesn't come to her house and she can't afford a satellite dish. She gets one station, and it comes in fuzzy. But it carries her religious shows, and those are what keep her going. Come Feb. 17, those shows are likely to be gone.

She, and others who lose their signals have some options. They can get a better antenna, or replace the old rabbit ears with a rooftop antenna. Many problems will be solved just by pointing the roof antenna in a different direction.

That's another downside to the Feb. 17 deadline, especially here in New England. Have you looked at your roof lately? Do you want to risk life and limb climbing up there in the middle of winter to adjust the antenna?

Speaking of weather, a farmer in Oklahoma told my source that watching for tornado reports is a life-or-death matter. Heavy weather distorts analog broadcasts, he said, but knocks digital broadcasts off the air entirely.

One industry estimate says 85 percent of viewers will get better reception after digital conversion, while 15 percent will lose channels. Those in the latter category are disproportionately poor, elderly and live in rural areas.

The demographics of those dependent on antennas for TV reception is one argument for spending $1.3 billion of the taxpayers' money - so far - to provide coupons and support to help people adjust to the conversion. As Markey says, nobody told these folks when they bought their TVs 5 or 10 years ago that an act of Congress would make them obsolete.

The other argument is the $20 billion the federal government took in by auctioning off parts of the broadcast spectrum freed up by the DTV switch. Markey says he pushed for more of that money to be set aside to help people handle the conversion, but the Republicans took the auction proceeds and spent it on tax cuts and wars.

What about those of us with cable or satellite TV? What do we get from this? Well, there are the wireless services, as yet unspecified, that will be broadcast on the analog spectrum by AT&T and Verizon, which bought that space at the federal auction.

Then there's the question of what the broadcasters will do with the extra channels created by this new system. Not only will there be a channel 5, for instance, but channels 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and so on. The broadcasters could use one as a local weather channel, a 24/7 sports station, a news channel or movie channel. They could produce their own programming, or lease that channel to CNN, Turner Classic Movies or the Home Shopping Network.

People now spending $50 a month for cable TV may find they now get the things they need for free, over the airwaves. The local channels may even come up with popular programs the cable companies won't be able to carry, at least not without paying the broadcasters.

But that which is possible isn't necessarily profitable, says Markey. Broadcast advertising revenue has tumbled in the last few years. Broadcast companies may have a hard time paying for the equipment to get these new channels working, let alone producing programming that will draw advertisers.

Meanwhile, Washington is doing its best to mess up the conversion to DTV. At the urging of President Obama, the Senate unanimously voted to extend the deadline from Feb. 17 to mid-June, with an additional $500 million or so to provide enough discount coupons to handle the demand and staff more call centers to help consumers figure it out.

But the House this week shot down the extension after Republicans argued it was too expensive. Along with the GOP's refusal to provide a single vote in support of Obama's economic recovery package, such obstructionism seems a strange political strategy. Republicans pushed through the DTV program in 2005 - a bill Markey opposed, he is quick to point out - and a Republican administration botched the handling of it. Now they shoot down an attempt to fix it?

Markey and House Democrats will try again this week to get the DTV deadline extended, and if they are smart, Republicans will get on board. It's bad enough to be seen as dragging your feet when it comes to rescuing a sinking economy. But woe unto the politician who gets blamed for making millions of Americans' televisions go dark.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor of the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.townonline.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.

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